ALLUSION IN POETRY

Introduction

Poems commonly include words or phrases
borrowed from the poetry of other authors, {1} but allusion means
more than plagiarism or poetic diction, and something other than
extended simile. Matters have become somewhat technical, and criticism
today tends to distinguish 1. reinscription (amplifications of previous
texts), 2. quotation (taking over the previous text in its entirety,
including concept and texture), 3. echo (lacking conscious intention)
and 4. intertextuality (involuntary
incorporation of previous word usage and associations). {2}

A literary allusion is an explicit or implicit
reference to another literary text that can be recognized and understood
as such by competent readers. {3}

Uses

Allusion is used to:
1. display literary knowledge or cleverness.
2. advertise membership of a poetic tradition or community.
3. add historical depth to a word or phrase.
4. suggest an association with literary excellence.
5. show topicality by reference to recent events.
6. sharpen contrasts, as in satire.
7. imply a generality of experience: often the human condition.

Cultural
Considerations

Allusion is the staple of many
poetic traditions. Islamic poetry draws heavily on the
Koran, as Jewish {4} and Christian {5} {6} poetry does
on the Bible. Until the late nineteenth century, and
even beyond, {7} English poetry also made much use of
Classical allusion.{8}
The Chinese indeed expect to find repeated allusion
in poetry, and some of Du
Fu's late poems, for example, have every
word or phrase alluding to usage in the illustrious
past. Japanese poetry even laid down rules governing
its use. {9} Modernist
poetry also employs its own brand of allusion, generally
more personal and sometimes obscure. {10} {11}

Reinscription

Renaissance poets tended not merely
to make reference to the classical past but to extend and
modify classical allusions for their own purposes, commonly
to assert nationhood or literary independence. Edmund Spenser's
Shepherdes Calendar accepted the pastoral mode of Theocritus
with its autumnal mood, but added political denunciation.
His Faerie Queene went further, converting the poema
cavalleresco of Lodovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso into
an extended allegory constructed around Aristotle's twelve
moral virtues. {12}

Echo

Distinctions between allusion and echo tend to blur in practice,
but Philip Larkin's Your mind lay open like a drawer of
knives in his poem Deceptions would be an echo
of George Herbert's My thoughts are all a case of knives
in his poem Affliction because the reference seems
to have been unconscious. Elizabeth Bishop, however, explicitly
makes reference to Herbert in her poem Wading at Wellfleet
by putting all a case of knives within quotation marks.
{1}

Classical
Allusion: Pope

A famous example comes in line 176 of Alexander Pope's
Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle IV To Richard
Boyle, Earl of Burlington: {13}

Yet hence the poor are cloth'd, the hungry fed;
Health to himself, and to his infants bread
The lab'rer bears: What his hard heart denies,
His charitable vanity supplies.

Another age shall see the golden ear
Embrown the slope, and nod on the parterre,
Deep harvests bury all his pride has plann'd,
And laughing Ceres reassume the land.

And laughing Ceres is not only beautiful but
strikingly apt, referring to the earth goddess (Demeter)
of wheat and grain, who spread knowledge of the agricultural
arts. The ostentatious country house will be given over
to the plough, and the land made productive again.

Development:
Pound's Cantos (1925-60)

Whatever their
originating misconception,
Pound took the high road of allusion
in his Cantos. Allusions were
initially simple quotes, which evoked
the work from which they were taken,
giving the Cantos a thickness
and seriousness of meaning. But they
could also be juxtaposed, which set
up shocks and interrelations in the
reader. By 1927, the approach had
developed into what Pound called ideograms,
where the component images interacted
'simultaneously to present a complex
of meaning'. {14} Take, for example,
lines 36-44 of Canto XXX:

Came Madam 'Yle
Clothed with the light of the altar
And with the price of the candles.
"Honour? Balls for yr honour!
Take two million and swallow it."
Is
come Messire Alfonso
And is departed by boat for Ferrara
And has passed here without saying
'O'.

Pound is referring
to the proxy marriage of Alfonso d'Este
to Lucrezia Borgia (whom he calls
Madame Hyle, the Greek word for matter),
which reflects the sexual and monetary
corruption of the Papacy under the
Borgias. In larger context, this and
surrounding stanzas illustrate Pound's
belief that Baroque art had subverted
the purity of the Italian primitives,
and that the taste and vigour of families
like the d'Este were preferable to
the 'usury' of contemporary banking
institutions. {15)

Pound's phrasing
is like no other, with a mischievous
parody of diplomatic language (is
departed. . . ), pungent humour and
the sly reference to the Borgias counting
the cost of the wedding candles. A
wide range of matters is brought into
play, and it is difficult to see how
the complex emotional timbre could
be achieved in other ways.

: Historical and Topical Allusion

The enormous tragedy of the dream
in the peasant's bent shoulders
Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed,
Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano
by
the heels at Milano {16}

The lines conflate the Fascist claims
to bring social justice to Italy with the
deaths of both the founder of the Manichaen
religion and of Benito Mussolini and his
mistress in the closing stages of WWII.
Pound wrote this opening section of the
Pisan Cantos when the death of his
hero was still fresh in his mind, and when
he himself faced prosecution for treason.
The three fragments bridge the centuries
and seem the more powerful for being presented
without comment.

: Literary Parodies

Oh to be in England now that Winston's
out
Now
that there's room for doubt
And
the bank may be the nation's
And
the long years of patience
And
labour's vacillations
May have let the bacon come home,
{17}

The section starts with a parody of Browning's
Home Thoughts from Abroad, {18} and
moves into political comment on the Labour
Government returned in elections after WWII.
Pound is still identifying with the Axis
powers.

: Good Guy Stereotypes

Pound's allusions can also descend to
a sort of chinoiserie, a simplistic view
of the orient and elsewhere. His 'good guy's
in Canto LV, for example, are not merely
caricatures, but mishandle Chinese history.

Came OUEN-TSONG and kicked out 3000 fancies
let
loose the falcons
yet he also was had by the eunuchs after
15 years reign
OU-TSONG destroyed hochang pagodas,
spent
his time drillin' and huntin'
Brass idols turned into ha'pence
chased
out the bonzes from temples
46
thousand temples . . . {19}

These allude to 'true events' of course,
as PhD theses and student's guides demonstrate,
{20} {21} {22} {23} but only in the sense
that events in "A Child's First Book
of the Saints" are true, as simple
pictures. Economic matters, and more so
the structure of Chinese society, {24} {25}
{26} are too complex (and fascinating) to
be properly represented by such cut-out
figures. The allusions baffle the common
reader and exasperate the knowledgeable,
so failing in their primary task, which
is to illustrate, support and enlarge our
understanding of Pound's stress on good
governance.

: Private Allusions

so that leaving America I brought
with me $80
and England a letter
of Thomas Hardy's
and Italy one eucalyptus
pip
from the salita that goes up from
Rapallo {27}

The allusions here are clear enough to
anyone who knows Pound's life, but the memories,
or rather what they meant to Pound, stay
private.

: Pretension

If Basil sing of Shah Nameh, and
wrote
{Frdwsi
in Farsi}
Firdush'
on his door
Thus saith Kabir: 'Politically' said
Rabindranath
they
are inactive. They think, but then
there is
climate, they think but it is warm
or there are flies
or some insects' {28}

Pound was inclined to air his knowledge
by playing the "village explainer".
Persian and Hindi themes seem hardly relevant
in this example, and even Firdush'
is misspelt, unless this is one of Pound's
chummy improvisations. Kabir {29} is a very
different writer from Ferdowsi, {30} and
Rabindranath Tagore's {31} comment seems
little more than name-dropping. The switch
to economic theory in the succeeding line
leaves the quotation disappearing into the
air.

:Some Conclusions

Are such 'complexes of meaning' really
meanings at all, therefore, and do they
cohere into larger units? Pound didn't write
a traditional epic, and while certain themes
appear in the poem, there is no story line
or central character to hold the composition
together. Repetitions and references to
earlier sections thicken the weave, but
don't add clarity.

Of course we can say that life is
discontinuous, and that the shifting focus
of the Cantos foreshadow the mix
of events we see nightly on the news-channels
In that regard, the Cantos have been
an important influence on l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e
poets and others. But art has always claimed
to do more than mirror experience: it has
claimed to give continuity, intensity and
significance to events. Pound gives us a
world of marvellous breadth, great beauty
and intriguing comparisons, but it is also
a looking-glass world where Pound the street
barker is always appearing.

Allusions add to the emotional and semantic
texture of poetry, and provide a generality
of appeal even when we don't fully understand
them. Pound's allusions often succeed because
they are extraordinary evocative, freshly
struck, mimic a great range of voices, are
rhythmically deft and have a broad dash
of humour. Nonetheless, all that admitted,
the overall and finally disappointing effect
is looseness, the variousness of what can
be read into them. A few lines are delightful,
an individual canto somewhat dizzying, and
the poem as a whole a disorientating experience
that leaves us distanced from ourselves
and intellectually light-headed. Even the
well-anthologized and more personal Pisan
Cantos  which many expert readers
{32} find the most moving  can appear
somewhat egotistical, with Pound seemingly
indifferent to the consequences of his views.

I personally find Pound a gloriously entertaining
writer, and many years' reading of the Cantos
have not diminished my enjoyment. Possibly
the shortcomings of the approach are more
Pound's, who was inclined to pass off pretence
and obscurity as deeper meaning. Nonetheless,
Pound's ideas are not always too interesting,
and that limits how seriously we can take
him. Allusion is an important element of
poetry, but when it usurps others it becomes
yet another example of 'perpetual
revolution' in twentieth-century poetry.

Allusion
by Awareness

Literary allusion is vast field of scholarship,
even if focused on a single poet {33} or
the similarities of allusion to heteroglossia.
{34} Not strictly allusion, but still illuminating,
is the way poets pick up ways of handling
their material from near-contemporaries,
{35} when their lines gain from keeping
those other treatments in mind. Here are
snippets of poems by writers who maintained
a wary knowledge of each other's productions:

Philip Larkin's Home is So Sad:
{36}

You can see how it was;
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

And Seamus Heaney's Old Pewter:

of illiteracy under rafters:
a dented hand-me-down old smoky plate
full of blizzards, sullied and temperate

Both express the universal yearning for
home, but the first poem undercuts the happy
clichés with particular instances,
the pathos being held back behind the downbeat
tone. The second is a commemoration of the
rural community, the glimmering pewter perhaps
being an emblem of the soul and its imperfections.
{37} We have to say 'perhaps' because such
a meaning can be read into the line, but
is not compelled by it  i.e. the line
is sufficient intriguing not to need the
glosses of academia.